Score One For Reagan

November 22, 1985|By Leslie H. Gelb, The New York Times

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND — The summit meeting that ended on Thursday was widely seen by officials on both sides as a victory for President Reagan, who wanted to emphasize process and play down substance, and a setback for Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who had staked so much personal prestige on an arms control breakthrough at the two- day encounter.

Before the meeting, Gorbachev gambled that by threatening a failure in Geneva, he could elicit concessions from Reagan on space-based defenses. By all current accounts, it did not work. Now, according to Soviet officials, he will revert to a longer-term strategy of trying to turn American and allied opinion against Reagan`s Strategic Defense Initiative.

Reagan calculated that the Soviet leader also could not afford a failed summit meeting because of his domestic priorities, including the weak Soviet economy and the need for Gorbachev to buttress his power base.

As it turned out, the two leaders took the meeting into their own hands in a remarkable display of personal diplomacy. From what is known, this was unplanned as of last week and apparently evolved more or less spontaneously.

On the surface, there was good personal chemistry and optimistic talk about the future.

On substance, the two leaders bucked up against the hard realities of their conflicts and deep differences and made scant, if any, progress on nuclear arms control and regional disputes.

In practical terms, they agreed to establish what Reagan called a process and what Gorbachev termed a mechanism to keep disputes from getting out of control and to try to resolve them through negotiations.

Every sign pointed to the conclusion that Reagan did not convince Gorbachev of the virtues of space-based defenses, nor did Gorbachev persuade Reagan to abandon any of his programs to develop these defenses.

The joint statement that the two leaders issued on Thursday masked this fundamental gap. It said they would work ``to prevent an arms race in space and to terminate it on Earth.``

Predictably, Gorbachev stated that ``the significance of anything`` depended on carrying it ``into concrete measures.`` Or, as Reagan put it: ``The real report card on Geneva will not come in for months or even years.``